Re:Neither necessary nor sufficient
on
QA != Testing
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· Score: 2, Interesting
I prefer the continuous approach: When you have enough design, start coding.
There was an article at Slashdot quite recently (yesterday) which actually argued, that coding is the real design process. All the other processes would be just tools to help clarify and support the thinking process of the programmer/designer, and not every tool works the same for every programmer/designer.
He even argued that all the new design approaches (rapid prototyping, extreme programming etc.pp.) were just here to allow the starting of the actual coding as early as possible (and to convince the Design Is All Coding Is Supplemental people without actually forcing them to admit, that design is coding in the software world).
All discussion boils down to the question, what part of software production is actually design, and what is manufacturing. His answer was: the border line between design and manufacturing is defined as the point when the descriptions and documentations are in a state to allow all further development without any creativity, just as a mechanistic process. So he came to the conclusion that this state is reached when the final product (the software) is translated from the high level programming language into object code by purely mechanic/logic instruments as compiler and linker.
But he still gives a deadline to them. Otherwise they wouldn't know when to stop playing with their toys. Ok. You could argue that they are playing until the next project runs in, thus the deadline being an extern influence. But then he never can tell his supervisors when they can get the next project scheduled.
It is similar to the "homework" approach many parents use: "You are free to play whatever you want as soon as your homework is done." (which implicitely sets the deadline to 'until bed time').
Hm... The updates for MediaPlayer are still the only patches that come up with WindowsUpdate everytime I check for patches from my Win2K machine. As a matter of fact, the automatic updates install only the urgent patches anyway, and none of the "recommended".
First: four grains are a carat, and a carat is 200 mg, so 20 grains go into a metric gram. Second: The Hope Diamond is about 67.125 c, which puts it at 13.425 gram. Third: A dose of 13.425 gram of salt (NaCl) is considered hazardous to human health, and 30 gram are almost a deadly dose. So if you ever think about taking a dose of salt the size of the Hope Diamond, make sure, the 911 call will get through.
The sad thing here is that Gilmore does have a valid point, but his childish behaviour at the airport has detracted from it terribly.
I don't know about this special case, but in some other cases you have to be "directly affected" to be able to sue. So if Mr. Gilmore just showed his ID, travelled and later on started to find out what law was requiring him to show his ID, he might not have the legal lever to force someone to actually show him the law in question.
So he had to create a situation where he is actually banned from flying, so he can sue to either have his ban lifted or to have the law cited to him, that is actually banning him from flying.
If his aims are to find out what law requires a person to produce a gouvernementally issued ID, then suing the airport under the ADA doesn't really help.
Put yourself in a similar situation. Someone requests something from you, and states: "It's the law." And then you ask: "Which law?", and the answer is: "I am not allowed to tell you." Wouldn't you get interested which law he is referring to?
No. No one orders Kölsch as "0.2l of Kölsch". It's rather "Bringen Sie einen Meter!" (Serve a meter!), which refers to a wooden bar of roughly three feets (1 meter) length with holes, where a glass of Kölsch is put in every hole.
Sorry to be nitpicking, but in the paragraph about the Pez #98, they quote the german word 'Pfefferminz'. And they write it with 'tz'! The horror!
Every german schoolkid has to learn this: "Nach l, n, r, das merk dir ja, steht nie tz und nie ck!" (Remember this: No tz and no ck after l, n, r!) Ok, not everyone actually gets it... but anyway.
It's schwarz and not schwartz. It's Maerzen and not Martzen. And it's Pfefferminz, not Pfeffermintz. (And pretzls are actually spelled Brezeln, but that' something completely different.)
Yes, that's what I called "balance sense". It's part of the inner ear, basicly three tubes forming rings oriented in each direction, filled with a fluid. In the fluid swim small particles, and the walls of the tubes have little hairs. You notice the gravity because the small particles sink down and affect the hairs at the lower part of the tube. If you move, the fluid starts to stream through the tube, and the particles wander with the fluid, thus affecting other hears = you sense motion.
There are a lot of animals which can sense aerosols. Aerosols typically get into the atmosphere during a large earthquake, and they get into the air as soon as the first small cracks in the earth surface happen. Those cracks might be too small to generate sufficient vibration for hundreds of miles to alert the measuring equipment of the geophysicists. But the animals in the surrounding area sniff the aerosols and start to panic.
There is also the fact that a sonic wave has about three to five times the speed in water compared to air (~1000-1500 m/sec, don't know the exact number right now), and the earthquake surely made a big noise in the water, which travelled literally at super sonic (air)speed. So all water living animals were alerted early. At a distance of 1000mls for instance the tsunami wave, speeding with about 500mph arrived after about two hours. The sonic wave in the ocean reached a distance of 1000mls already after ~1000-1500sec, about 20-30 minutes after the earthquake. Enough time for the water living animals to show lots of panic before the tsunami wave hit the shores.
PS: Humans have seven senses anyway: the optical sense (eye), the acoustic sense (ear), the taste sense (tongue), the smell sense (nose), the tactile sense (skin), the thermic sense (skin too) and the balance sense (inner ear). If you want to get pedantic, you can even difference the optical sense into the brightness sense and the color sense (which are recorded by different types of cells in the retina).
Depends on how the equilibrium is reached. If the equilibrium falls on an attractor point it is indeed not easy to move something out of the equilibrium, because you have to overcome the attractor force. But there are also eqilibrium points at repulsors, points where the balance function diverges in every environment except for the repulsor point itself.
And the second, more basic difference is that between tipping a balance and reaching balance. It's quite easy to tip a balance out of equilibrium (as planned on Mars). It's damn complicated to keep a complex system in balance (as necessary on Earth).
You mean, France, Russia and Germany didn't buy into it. And, um, perhaps that might just have been because Saddam was buying them off with oil
Does it bother you that they just were right? And that you blindly believed someone who himself blindly believed what had to be right because his political agenda didn't allow something else?
Fact is: Mr. Kay didn't find any WMD program in an Iraq where every site and every place was open to him. Fact is: Hans Blix's inspectors found in 1995 a biological warfare program at a site that was supposedly a chicken food plant (the inspector who actually went there was a german), which amounts to the 650kg of biological material Hans Blix made a remark about. Fact is: Every 'proof' that Mr. Powell presented to the UN Security Council was none. Fact is: The allegeded Yellow Cake trade with Niger Mr. Bush cited in his speeches was a forgery. Fact is: No one outside the U.S. intelligence circles and government seemed convinced about Iraq's WMD progress, even the british scientist who was working at this (and by himself was convinced that maybe they could find a proof, but as of then they had none) talked about his doubts to a BBC reporter (who in turn called Mr. Blair a liar, when Mr. Blair in fact had just an interesting way of telling the truth, that's where everything got messy).
Fact is: Saddam Hussein was trying to buy any support he could get hold of. He even was trying to buy himself into diverse terrorist circles, but failed utterly, as the report to the Congress from Mr. Kay shows. He was gripping every straw he could find. He tried to bribe all people he thought could get him a little more out of his mess. He spent (as far as we know today) about US$ 2,5 billion on bribery.
But to say that someone actually believed the truth because he got bribed to believe the truth is... lets put it like this... quite strange.
Now we are at the point where the good design of Lisp really shines:) You can implement Lisp very easy in every language. This makes Lisp highly portable. Once you get the Lisp-in-Lisp implementation running in any environment (which is easy, because the Lisp-in-Lisp is so short), you can be assured that your Lisp implementation works exactly as all the other Lisp implementations everywhere, because you have only one program that has to be tested for compatibility. All the other Lisp programs you can run inside the Lisp-in-Lisp environment.
And if you change the Lisp environment (by adding extensions to the language), you will surely implement them in Lisp, and magically they run everywhere you originally got Lisp-in-Lisp running. Differently in Perl, where extensions to the Perl language core are implemented in C, and use hundreds of files which have to be ported to a new system. A compatibility test for Perl has to check lots of features of the underlying system libraries for C, and because from system to system they differ slighty, you have such subtle differences like those documented in FAQ Part 8.
In comparision a compatibility test for Lisp just checks if the Lisp-in-Lisp is running smoothly. If you get half a page of Lisp running correctly, you get Lisp running correctly. This opens a lot of other possibilities: You can optimize your Lisp interpreter for your system without fear of losing the compatibility to any Lisp code you may get from other people. You can do profiling and selfoptimizing without fearing to stumble at obscure or esoteric features seldom used by anyone, but just a single library you depend on, which in turn creates nearly non trackable Heisenbugs (once you know in which part they occur, you don't know at which data, and once you know the data that triggers the bug, you don't know in which part of your software they occur) with your specially optimized version of Perl.
All together: The big advantage of Lisp is that it is completely self contained. Quite differently to Perl, which is contained in a somewhat POSIX compliant C based environment.
You don't understand what his criticism for Perl is all about. You'll understand it once you try to implement Perl in Perl (as an exercise you could start to implement the Perl RegExp in Perl without using Perl RegExp).
(Non-ANSI, but original) Lisp is a language that is implemented in itself in about half a letter page.
Even Smalltalk can be implemented in Smalltalk in a quite compact manner.
Perl needs a quite large compiler to turn Perl code into the runtime code. And every new feature in Perl is done in a way, that the compiler has to be changed and a formerly syntactically wrong line gets a semantic put on.
Perl is fine for what it was thought out for: To crunch large amounts of similarily structured data into human readable reports. That's what most CGIs or admin scripts are about: filtering database entries or long logfiles and converting the results into webpages or other human accessible documents. (Or getting huge amounts of data and turning them into log file entries and data base lines.)
It is still a Practical Extraction and Report Language. Alan Kay didn't dispute it. But it gets most of it's power as a language from what Alan Kay has called "an egyptian pyramid", a huge number of bricks and buildingblocks put together by brute force and thousands of slaves, but not from its inherent design qualities.
Re:It is not about how much rocket costs..
on
Hondas in Space
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· Score: 3, Informative
Usually the price tag for developping a new car for mass production is estimated between US$ 2 and 2.5 billion. If a car sells 1 mio units during its production cycle, it's still between US$ 2000 and 2500 development cost per car. So if you build a rocket for X-Price with the hope to get 5 units running, and it would cost you about US$ 2 billion to design it, then the price per rocket will still be at 400 mio US$, much mor than the original X-Price is worth.
I learned most of motor history as a child in the local Traffic Museum in Dresden, which is full with stories about Gottlieb Daimler, Carl Benz and Wilhelm Maybach. They have replicas of Daimler's motocycle (the Petroleum-Reitwagen) and Benz's Patent Motorwagen, but I can't remember seeing there a single Ford-labelled exponat. So for me Henry Ford was just some footnote to automobile history, not a predominant figure. The same effect goes for the airplane: Stories about Otto Lilienthal, Hans Grade and Hugo Junkers, but the Brothers Wright are given just a short side note. (With Otto Lilienthal being the first who got flying "heavier than air" basicly right, Hans Grade being the first who was using the airplane commercially and Hugo Junkers getting credited for the Junkers F13, the first full metal airplane.) As you can see, every country has its own stories of who is the most important for a certain technological development. Henry Ford may be great in the U.S., but that doesn't count anywhere else.
The EU is not a democratic organisation. When people elect people who elect people, democracy is not the correct term.
How is that different to the fact that the U.S. citizens don't elect the president but vote for an electoral college? How is that different to the fact that the german chancellor don't get voted for by the people but by the german Bundestag (parliament)?
Gottlieb Daimler and Wilhelm Maybach invented the motocycle in 1885 (and they got a patent for it). And they invented the first rather high touring gasoline engine. The models before the Daimler-Maybach construction were revving at about 200/min, while Gottlieb Daimler invented the glow tube ignition and thus was able to get his engine at 900/min. (The glow tube later got replaced by Bosch's invention of the high voltage magnet ignition, which is basicly used until today). The motocycle was build to show the capabilities of the new, comparatively small and light machine, which got far beyond the current uses of the gasoline engine, which was mainly employed to power machines in workshops. (Benz's engine which powered the Patent Motor Waggon, the first gasoline powered car, used already a magnetic ignition, but was maxing out at about 450/min).
It's not talking about brand recognition. It's about brand impact. Imagine yourself answering to the question "From which brand you heard interesting news recently?". Would you answer Q-Tips? Kleenex? Jell-O?
At least setting up a NATting box is no task for the vendor selling you a desktop operating system. And to use a completely bogus analogy: It's not the task of the construction company of your house to take care that you lock your door when you leave the house.
With point 1) and 2) I go d'accord.
Your point 3) is an attempt to cure at a symptom instead of healing the sickness. (Host firewalls are a bad idea by themselves anyway.) Normally every service should be configurable in a way that you can restrict it to localhost. You should even be able to configure your security policy in a way that every service you start is restricted to localhost until you configure it otherways. So everyone can minimize the exposition of his computer to unwanted connection attempts from the outside.
Point 4) is the most dangerous suggestions of all. If you already know which type of data are an attack, and you are the company creating the operating system, why not code your services in a way that they are robust enough to withstand this known attack? We are not talking about theoretical threads no one has thought out yet. We are talking about data patterns which are "interesting" enough to cause an automated script to react on it! Scripts that are running in the background and doing stuff? What if the attacker is not really targetting your computer, but using the automated reaction of the scripts to DDOS the server intended to get the interesting packets for further analysis?
I am not very keen with every security solution that starts out with adding another layer of complexity to an already overloaded system. K.I.S.S. is the way to go also in computer protection. Every additional program or service I have to start on a system already out of bounds so no one can really say where the next security hole will pop up has a hard day to explain why it could magically turn the swiss cheese in a sturdy wall.
I have tried this on Windows, in fact I am running Win2K right now. RPC is one of the services that cause headaches to people involved in computer security, because it's so intensely used everywhere, and it's virtually impossible to restrict it to localhost.
That's why I recommend a NATting box for most people asking me how to secure their computer. It's cheap, it's easy to set up, and normally once it's running you have never to touch it again. The only thing it doesn't protect against are spyware and Trojan horses the user installes involuntarily by clicking on the wrong object. But at least a NATting box allows to detect those by logging the connections coming from the computer. A program which doesn't connect to the outside world is much less a security thread.
The problem in question is the number of distinguishable bodies. With weather you would have to go down to the single molecule in the air, to get a quite good prediction. In fact current weather models use cubes of air where the conditions are considered constant (same temperature, same pressure, same direction of air flow in the same cube) and take them as distinguishable bodies. Those models are a compromise between the sheer number of necessary elements, the number crunching limits of current calculation hardware and the difference between the used model and the reality.
With stellar bodies it's much more easy. The number of stellar bodies you need for a prediction is much smaller, the bodies themself can be considered almost constant for the whole calculation etc.pp. With the number crunching capacity of today's weather prediction centers you can simulate whole galaxies (if you consider stars constant, which they mainly are for about 10mio to 10bio years, depending on their mass). With the differences between your model and the measured reality you can spot elements you didn't simulate yet and add them to your model. The swiss team now was simulating clouds of about the mass of the earth and the size of the solar system and found that those added to the stellar simulation made a quite good fit to the measured data.
A Windows computer is probably as secure as a Linux machine if adequate measures are taken: antivirus programs, firewalls (generally included in the former), secure passwords, not running as Admin and most importantly, frequent updates.
Host firewalls are about the fifth best thing you can do. After:
Going through the services you are running and through the output of the "netstat -a" command, understanding what every LISTENing socket means, which program are causing which connections, and turning off everything you don't need
Applying all security relevant patches for the services and programs you need to have running (just adding the patch clusters called "Service Packs" and going through WindowsUpdate works fine in most cases for a desktop machine)
Putting your machine behind a stand alone firewall or at least a NATting router (They just cost about $50, less than most Pro versions of the host firewalls, are immune to trojan horse attacks against your desktop, and in the most cases have a better feature set)
Have your firewall log your network activity and regularily look at the log files
Host firewalls have a big disadvantage: They are vulnerable in the same way the underlying operating system is vulnerable. So if a Trojan Horse is able to take over the machine, it can easily switch off the firewall. The only thing that hinders Trojan Horses to do exactly this is a) the missing necessity to do it (there are enough targets out there which miss a host firewall) and b) the routine to switch off the firewall software has to deal with several different software packages to be effective. So for a Trojan Horse author it's almost not worth the effort (yet).
I am in the most cases against any software firewalls because they give a false feeling of security which in reality is not there. And they are all popping up non understandable windows to the average user, where she has to decide if he should allow a connection or not. How should she know? For me the better way to handle this is to (silently) block the connection and make a log file entry about this. So if something seems to be broken one can easily check the logfile for blocked connections and then explicitely allowing them for further use.
Slashdot Mirror
I prefer the continuous approach: When you have enough design, start coding.
There was an article at Slashdot quite recently (yesterday) which actually argued, that coding is the real design process. All the other processes would be just tools to help clarify and support the thinking process of the programmer/designer, and not every tool works the same for every programmer/designer.
He even argued that all the new design approaches (rapid prototyping, extreme programming etc.pp.) were just here to allow the starting of the actual coding as early as possible (and to convince the Design Is All Coding Is Supplemental people without actually forcing them to admit, that design is coding in the software world).
All discussion boils down to the question, what part of software production is actually design, and what is manufacturing. His answer was: the border line between design and manufacturing is defined as the point when the descriptions and documentations are in a state to allow all further development without any creativity, just as a mechanistic process. So he came to the conclusion that this state is reached when the final product (the software) is translated from the high level programming language into object code by purely mechanic/logic instruments as compiler and linker.
But he still gives a deadline to them. Otherwise they wouldn't know when to stop playing with their toys. Ok. You could argue that they are playing until the next project runs in, thus the deadline being an extern influence. But then he never can tell his supervisors when they can get the next project scheduled.
It is similar to the "homework" approach many parents use: "You are free to play whatever you want as soon as your homework is done." (which implicitely sets the deadline to 'until bed time').
Hm... The updates for MediaPlayer are still the only patches that come up with WindowsUpdate everytime I check for patches from my Win2K machine. As a matter of fact, the automatic updates install only the urgent patches anyway, and none of the "recommended".
First: four grains are a carat, and a carat is 200 mg, so 20 grains go into a metric gram.
Second: The Hope Diamond is about 67.125 c, which puts it at 13.425 gram.
Third: A dose of 13.425 gram of salt (NaCl) is considered hazardous to human health, and 30 gram are almost a deadly dose.
So if you ever think about taking a dose of salt the size of the Hope Diamond, make sure, the 911 call will get through.
The sad thing here is that Gilmore does have a valid point, but his childish behaviour at the airport has detracted from it terribly.
I don't know about this special case, but in some other cases you have to be "directly affected" to be able to sue. So if Mr. Gilmore just showed his ID, travelled and later on started to find out what law was requiring him to show his ID, he might not have the legal lever to force someone to actually show him the law in question.
So he had to create a situation where he is actually banned from flying, so he can sue to either have his ban lifted or to have the law cited to him, that is actually banning him from flying.
If his aims are to find out what law requires a person to produce a gouvernementally issued ID, then suing the airport under the ADA doesn't really help.
Put yourself in a similar situation. Someone requests something from you, and states: "It's the law." And then you ask: "Which law?", and the answer is: "I am not allowed to tell you." Wouldn't you get interested which law he is referring to?
No. No one orders Kölsch as "0.2l of Kölsch". It's rather "Bringen Sie einen Meter!" (Serve a meter!), which refers to a wooden bar of roughly three feets (1 meter) length with holes, where a glass of Kölsch is put in every hole.
Sorry to be nitpicking, but in the paragraph about the Pez #98, they quote the german word 'Pfefferminz'. And they write it with 'tz'! The horror!
Every german schoolkid has to learn this: "Nach l, n, r, das merk dir ja, steht nie tz und nie ck!" (Remember this: No tz and no ck after l, n, r!) Ok, not everyone actually gets it... but anyway.
It's schwarz and not schwartz. It's Maerzen and not Martzen. And it's Pfefferminz, not Pfeffermintz. (And pretzls are actually spelled Brezeln, but that' something completely different.)
Yes, that's what I called "balance sense". It's part of the inner ear, basicly three tubes forming rings oriented in each direction, filled with a fluid. In the fluid swim small particles, and the walls of the tubes have little hairs. You notice the gravity because the small particles sink down and affect the hairs at the lower part of the tube. If you move, the fluid starts to stream through the tube, and the particles wander with the fluid, thus affecting other hears = you sense motion.
- brightness
- color
- noise
- taste
- smell
- temperature
- pressure
- pain
- balance
- orientation
Did we forget anything?I guess, we can also add:
There are a lot of animals which can sense aerosols. Aerosols typically get into the atmosphere during a large earthquake, and they get into the air as soon as the first small cracks in the earth surface happen. Those cracks might be too small to generate sufficient vibration for hundreds of miles to alert the measuring equipment of the geophysicists. But the animals in the surrounding area sniff the aerosols and start to panic.
There is also the fact that a sonic wave has about three to five times the speed in water compared to air (~1000-1500 m/sec, don't know the exact number right now), and the earthquake surely made a big noise in the water, which travelled literally at super sonic (air)speed. So all water living animals were alerted early. At a distance of 1000mls for instance the tsunami wave, speeding with about 500mph arrived after about two hours. The sonic wave in the ocean reached a distance of 1000mls already after ~1000-1500sec, about 20-30 minutes after the earthquake. Enough time for the water living animals to show lots of panic before the tsunami wave hit the shores.
PS: Humans have seven senses anyway: the optical sense (eye), the acoustic sense (ear), the taste sense (tongue), the smell sense (nose), the tactile sense (skin), the thermic sense (skin too) and the balance sense (inner ear).
If you want to get pedantic, you can even difference the optical sense into the brightness sense and the color sense (which are recorded by different types of cells in the retina).
Depends on how the equilibrium is reached. If the equilibrium falls on an attractor point it is indeed not easy to move something out of the equilibrium, because you have to overcome the attractor force. But there are also eqilibrium points at repulsors, points where the balance function diverges in every environment except for the repulsor point itself.
And the second, more basic difference is that between tipping a balance and reaching balance. It's quite easy to tip a balance out of equilibrium (as planned on Mars). It's damn complicated to keep a complex system in balance (as necessary on Earth).
Does it bother you that they just were right? And that you blindly believed someone who himself blindly believed what had to be right because his political agenda didn't allow something else?
Fact is: Mr. Kay didn't find any WMD program in an Iraq where every site and every place was open to him.
Fact is: Hans Blix's inspectors found in 1995 a biological warfare program at a site that was supposedly a chicken food plant (the inspector who actually went there was a german), which amounts to the 650kg of biological material Hans Blix made a remark about.
Fact is: Every 'proof' that Mr. Powell presented to the UN Security Council was none.
Fact is: The allegeded Yellow Cake trade with Niger Mr. Bush cited in his speeches was a forgery.
Fact is: No one outside the U.S. intelligence circles and government seemed convinced about Iraq's WMD progress, even the british scientist who was working at this (and by himself was convinced that maybe they could find a proof, but as of then they had none) talked about his doubts to a BBC reporter (who in turn called Mr. Blair a liar, when Mr. Blair in fact had just an interesting way of telling the truth, that's where everything got messy).
Fact is: Saddam Hussein was trying to buy any support he could get hold of. He even was trying to buy himself into diverse terrorist circles, but failed utterly, as the report to the Congress from Mr. Kay shows. He was gripping every straw he could find. He tried to bribe all people he thought could get him a little more out of his mess. He spent (as far as we know today) about US$ 2,5 billion on bribery.
But to say that someone actually believed the truth because he got bribed to believe the truth is... lets put it like this... quite strange.
Now we are at the point where the good design of Lisp really shines :) You can implement Lisp very easy in every language. This makes Lisp highly portable. Once you get the Lisp-in-Lisp implementation running in any environment (which is easy, because the Lisp-in-Lisp is so short), you can be assured that your Lisp implementation works exactly as all the other Lisp implementations everywhere, because you have only one program that has to be tested for compatibility. All the other Lisp programs you can run inside the Lisp-in-Lisp environment.
And if you change the Lisp environment (by adding extensions to the language), you will surely implement them in Lisp, and magically they run everywhere you originally got Lisp-in-Lisp running. Differently in Perl, where extensions to the Perl language core are implemented in C, and use hundreds of files which have to be ported to a new system. A compatibility test for Perl has to check lots of features of the underlying system libraries for C, and because from system to system they differ slighty, you have such subtle differences like those documented in FAQ Part 8.
In comparision a compatibility test for Lisp just checks if the Lisp-in-Lisp is running smoothly. If you get half a page of Lisp running correctly, you get Lisp running correctly. This opens a lot of other possibilities: You can optimize your Lisp interpreter for your system without fear of losing the compatibility to any Lisp code you may get from other people. You can do profiling and selfoptimizing without fearing to stumble at obscure or esoteric features seldom used by anyone, but just a single library you depend on, which in turn creates nearly non trackable Heisenbugs (once you know in which part they occur, you don't know at which data, and once you know the data that triggers the bug, you don't know in which part of your software they occur) with your specially optimized version of Perl.
All together: The big advantage of Lisp is that it is completely self contained. Quite differently to Perl, which is contained in a somewhat POSIX compliant C based environment.
You don't understand what his criticism for Perl is all about. You'll understand it once you try to implement Perl in Perl (as an exercise you could start to implement the Perl RegExp in Perl without using Perl RegExp).
(Non-ANSI, but original) Lisp is a language that is implemented in itself in about half a letter page.
Even Smalltalk can be implemented in Smalltalk in a quite compact manner.
Perl needs a quite large compiler to turn Perl code into the runtime code. And every new feature in Perl is done in a way, that the compiler has to be changed and a formerly syntactically wrong line gets a semantic put on.
Perl is fine for what it was thought out for: To crunch large amounts of similarily structured data into human readable reports. That's what most CGIs or admin scripts are about: filtering database entries or long logfiles and converting the results into webpages or other human accessible documents.
(Or getting huge amounts of data and turning them into log file entries and data base lines.)
It is still a Practical Extraction and Report Language. Alan Kay didn't dispute it. But it gets most of it's power as a language from what Alan Kay has called "an egyptian pyramid", a huge number of bricks and buildingblocks put together by brute force and thousands of slaves, but not from its inherent design qualities.
Usually the price tag for developping a new car for mass production is estimated between US$ 2 and 2.5 billion. If a car sells 1 mio units during its production cycle, it's still between US$ 2000 and 2500 development cost per car.
So if you build a rocket for X-Price with the hope to get 5 units running, and it would cost you about US$ 2 billion to design it, then the price per rocket will still be at 400 mio US$, much mor than the original X-Price is worth.
I learned most of motor history as a child in the local Traffic Museum in Dresden, which is full with stories about Gottlieb Daimler, Carl Benz and Wilhelm Maybach. They have replicas of Daimler's motocycle (the Petroleum-Reitwagen) and Benz's Patent Motorwagen, but I can't remember seeing there a single Ford-labelled exponat.
So for me Henry Ford was just some footnote to automobile history, not a predominant figure.
The same effect goes for the airplane: Stories about Otto Lilienthal, Hans Grade and Hugo Junkers, but the Brothers Wright are given just a short side note.
(With Otto Lilienthal being the first who got flying "heavier than air" basicly right, Hans Grade being the first who was using the airplane commercially and Hugo Junkers getting credited for the Junkers F13, the first full metal airplane.)
As you can see, every country has its own stories of who is the most important for a certain technological development. Henry Ford may be great in the U.S., but that doesn't count anywhere else.
How is that different to the fact that the U.S. citizens don't elect the president but vote for an electoral college?
How is that different to the fact that the german chancellor don't get voted for by the people but by the german Bundestag (parliament)?
Gottlieb Daimler and Wilhelm Maybach invented the motocycle in 1885 (and they got a patent for it).
And they invented the first rather high touring gasoline engine. The models before the Daimler-Maybach construction were revving at about 200/min, while Gottlieb Daimler invented the glow tube ignition and thus was able to get his engine at 900/min. (The glow tube later got replaced by Bosch's invention of the high voltage magnet ignition, which is basicly used until today). The motocycle was build to show the capabilities of the new, comparatively small and light machine, which got far beyond the current uses of the gasoline engine, which was mainly employed to power machines in workshops.
(Benz's engine which powered the Patent Motor Waggon, the first gasoline powered car, used already a magnetic ignition, but was maxing out at about 450/min).
It's not talking about brand recognition. It's about brand impact. Imagine yourself answering to the question "From which brand you heard interesting news recently?".
Would you answer Q-Tips? Kleenex? Jell-O?
At least setting up a NATting box is no task for the vendor selling you a desktop operating system. And to use a completely bogus analogy: It's not the task of the construction company of your house to take care that you lock your door when you leave the house.
With point 1) and 2) I go d'accord.
Your point 3) is an attempt to cure at a symptom instead of healing the sickness. (Host firewalls are a bad idea by themselves anyway.) Normally every service should be configurable in a way that you can restrict it to localhost. You should even be able to configure your security policy in a way that every service you start is restricted to localhost until you configure it otherways. So everyone can minimize the exposition of his computer to unwanted connection attempts from the outside.
Point 4) is the most dangerous suggestions of all. If you already know which type of data are an attack, and you are the company creating the operating system, why not code your services in a way that they are robust enough to withstand this known attack? We are not talking about theoretical threads no one has thought out yet. We are talking about data patterns which are "interesting" enough to cause an automated script to react on it! Scripts that are running in the background and doing stuff? What if the attacker is not really targetting your computer, but using the automated reaction of the scripts to DDOS the server intended to get the interesting packets for further analysis?
I am not very keen with every security solution that starts out with adding another layer of complexity to an already overloaded system. K.I.S.S. is the way to go also in computer protection. Every additional program or service I have to start on a system already out of bounds so no one can really say where the next security hole will pop up has a hard day to explain why it could magically turn the swiss cheese in a sturdy wall.
I have tried this on Windows, in fact I am running Win2K right now. RPC is one of the services that cause headaches to people involved in computer security, because it's so intensely used everywhere, and it's virtually impossible to restrict it to localhost.
That's why I recommend a NATting box for most people asking me how to secure their computer. It's cheap, it's easy to set up, and normally once it's running you have never to touch it again. The only thing it doesn't protect against are spyware and Trojan horses the user installes involuntarily by clicking on the wrong object. But at least a NATting box allows to detect those by logging the connections coming from the computer. A program which doesn't connect to the outside world is much less a security thread.
The problem in question is the number of distinguishable bodies. With weather you would have to go down to the single molecule in the air, to get a quite good prediction. In fact current weather models use cubes of air where the conditions are considered constant (same temperature, same pressure, same direction of air flow in the same cube) and take them as distinguishable bodies. Those models are a compromise between the sheer number of necessary elements, the number crunching limits of current calculation hardware and the difference between the used model and the reality.
With stellar bodies it's much more easy. The number of stellar bodies you need for a prediction is much smaller, the bodies themself can be considered almost constant for the whole calculation etc.pp. With the number crunching capacity of today's weather prediction centers you can simulate whole galaxies (if you consider stars constant, which they mainly are for about 10mio to 10bio years, depending on their mass). With the differences between your model and the measured reality you can spot elements you didn't simulate yet and add them to your model. The swiss team now was simulating clouds of about the mass of the earth and the size of the solar system and found that those added to the stellar simulation made a quite good fit to the measured data.
Host firewalls are about the fifth best thing you can do. After:
Host firewalls have a big disadvantage: They are vulnerable in the same way the underlying operating system is vulnerable. So if a Trojan Horse is able to take over the machine, it can easily switch off the firewall. The only thing that hinders Trojan Horses to do exactly this is a) the missing necessity to do it (there are enough targets out there which miss a host firewall) and b) the routine to switch off the firewall software has to deal with several different software packages to be effective. So for a Trojan Horse author it's almost not worth the effort (yet).
I am in the most cases against any software firewalls because they give a false feeling of security which in reality is not there. And they are all popping up non understandable windows to the average user, where she has to decide if he should allow a connection or not. How should she know? For me the better way to handle this is to (silently) block the connection and make a log file entry about this. So if something seems to be broken one can easily check the logfile for blocked connections and then explicitely allowing them for further use.